When the working class is in power the working class will, of course,
want to continue as the ruling class. At the same time there are layers
and forces that benefited from the order that preceded the workers state
and they will be working at restoring that situation. If the working
class did not maintain a state of its own there would be nothing to
prevent that. The old order would just walk in and reestablish itself.
Institutions like the police and military have to continue to hold those
fores at bay. Remember that those regressive forces come not only from
within but also from without. That is, a workers state cannot continue
to exist as the only workers state in the world if there are external
bourgeois states determined to overthrow it unless it guards against
those other bourgeois states too. But remember that when the working
class is the ruling class it is a ruling class of the majority, not just
the majority, but the vast majority. When the point comes that the
bourgeoisie internally and externally are weakened to the point that
they cannot be a danger to the workers state there is really no point in
their existing anymore as the bourgeoisie. This small minority is simply
absorbed into the majority class. Once there is no difference between
the rulers and the ruled there are no rulers because there is no one to
rule and that becomes the condition of classlessness. All the functions
of the state are not abolished in one fell swoop because the abolition
of classes is not accomplished in one fell swoop. But as people who are
available to be administered become harder to find the administrative
functions of the state are redirected. That is, instead of administering
people it will administer things. The functions of the state are turned
into the administration of production and distribution. Remember what I
have said before though. It is an open ended process. If the goal is to
minimize humanity's power over humanity and to maximize humanity's power
over nature there may not be a point at which we can say that an
absolute in this maximum and minimum has been reached. There are likely
to always be some inequities to be corrected and new scientific
discoveries to be made to benefit humanity. That means that the struggle
will have to continue into perpetuity.
On 7/21/2017 5:13 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
And of course the Ruling Class will muster its police force and defend
its right to rule. The last thing any Ruling Class wants is a
Classless Society. Since we Humans have been adjusted to living under
one Ruling Class or another, and the pattern is set in our
brains...and maybe in our DNA, how will we move to this Classless
Society? Maybe those who are left following the almost certain
violent upheaval that is looming on the horizon, will be able to set
such a system in place.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/21/17, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The role of police under any class society is to defend the position and
rule of the ruling class. If the ruling class is the working class then
it is the role of the police to defend the rule of the working class. As
I have explained in the past, the state is an apparatus by which one
class exerts rule over other classes by means of violence and the threat
of violence. The police are the embodiment of that threat of violence.
Only when a classless society has been achieved can the state be
dismantled and the police abolished.
On 7/21/2017 12:00 PM, Richard Driscoll wrote:
Roger:
Might one inquire as to what is the role of police under socialism?
Richard
On 7/21/2017 9:13 AM, Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender
rogerbailey81 for DMARC) wrote:
https://socialistaction.org/2017/07/18/what-is-the-role-of-police-under-capitalism/
What is the role of police under capitalism?
/ 3 days ago
Ferguson Tense After Shootout On Anniversary Of Michael Brown's Death
Protesters, marking the one-year anniversary of the shooting of
Michael Brown, are confronted by police on Aug. 11, 2015 in Ferguson,
Mo. Brown was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer on Aug. 9,
2014. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
By JOHN LESLIE
On June 9, 2017, a Philadelphia police officer, Ryan Pownall, shot
David Jones multiple times in the back as he ran away. Pownall had
stopped to search Jones, who had been riding a dirt bike. While
police claim that Jones had a gun, according to the Philadelphia
Inquirer, he “had already dropped the loaded 9 millimeter gun” when
the shooting occurred. (1)
Reports state that this is the second time that Pownall shot a
fleeing “suspect” in the back. The question of why a police officer
would fire at an unarmed and fleeing person remains. David Jones was
not a threat at the time he was shot.
Jones’ father, Thomas Jones, said, “I didn’t think my son would get
shot in the back, I thought there was a procedure where you would
tase a person first, or shoot a person in the leg. I didn’t think you
would shoot to kill if a person is running away. If someone is
running away from you, why shoot him in the back like an animal?”
On June 16, a Minnesota jury acquitted the police officer who gunned
down Philando Castile last year during a traffic stop. Castile, a
legal gun owner, had notified the officer that he was in possession
of a firearm and had a permit to carry. The cop opened fire, killing
Castile. The failure of the system to convict the cop who murdered
Philando Castile is just one more in a long series of outrages that
expose the lack of justice under the current system. The courts will
not protect our rights when the police are involved.
Epidemic of police violence against people of color
According to the Washington Post, police nationwide shot and killed
492 people in the first six months of this year. At this rate, police
killings will exceed 1000 for the year—for the third year in a row. A
quarter of the deaths have been Black men, although they represent
only six percent of the population.
Police brutality, and the ex-judicial murder of people of color, is
nothing new and extends back as far as the history of police. In
cities both North and South, police have enforced the existing social
order against any perceived threats. These threats could be
communists, labor organizations, LGBTQ people, or oppressed
nationalities.
Recent years have seen countless victims of police murder and
violence. Many incidents have been caught on video by witnesses, with
little or no consequences for the police involved. The Black Lives
Matter movement, which began in response to the murder of Trayvon
Martin, has continued to mobilize as police murdered Michael Brown,
Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and so many others.
Of course, there has always been resistance to police repression. In
Houston, in 1917, Black U.S. Army troops took up arms against local
police after cops attacked a member of their unit. During the 1960s,
there were rebellions against police repression in Detroit, Los
Angeles, Trenton, and other large cities. In the 1990s, the Los
Angeles rebellion followed the acquittal of cops who savagely beat
Rodney King. More recently, Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore exploded
after the police murders of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray.
Capitalism, police, and the state
The question of the police and their relationship to society is an
important one for socialists. Many unionists, members of oppressed
nationalities, and social movement activists have experienced police
repression. Any worker who has been on strike knows that cops are
called to suppress workers’ picket line actions and break strikes.
The police attack on counter-protesters during a recent far-right
demonstration in Portland is another example of the reactionary role
of cops. During the far right “free speech” mobilization, there were
friendly exchanges and “high fives” between police and ultra-right
protesters. Cooperation with rightist “Oath Keepers” extended to one
of the reactionaries assisting police with the arrest of a
counter-protester.
The state is not something particular to capitalism. The state is the
expression of the division of society into social classes with
conflicting interests. In “The Origin of the Family, Private
Property, and the State,” Frederick Engels writes that the state is
“a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the
admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble
contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable
antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these
antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might
not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became
necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that
would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of
‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself
above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.”
The state does not exist to “reconcile” the interests of the various
classes; The state exists for the subjugation of workers and
oppressed people by the dominant, or ruling, class. This is expressed
in the formation of police, the army, prisons, and other instruments
of coercion aimed at keeping working people in line.
In the U.S., policing cannot be separated from the racist nature of
the system. The origins of police in the U.S., especially in the
South, can be partially traced to the slave patrols formed to catch
runaway slaves. Later, police were the enforcers of Jim Crow
segregation. They remain an essential component of the regime of mass
incarceration, which imprisons hundreds of thousands of young Black
and Brown men and women.
Police and fascism
In Italy and Germany, during the rise of fascist movements, there was
cooperation between police and fascist groups. This cooperation
extended to Italian police training of Mussolini’s Black Shirts. In
the U.S., there have been demonstrated links with the Ku Klux Klan
(KKK) and neo-Nazi groups. For instance, in Houston, in the 1970s, it
was estimated that as many as 40% of the police department were
members of the KKK. The same could be said of police departments
across the South.
Racist policing is not something isolated to the South. Northern
cities have enforced de facto segregation for years through racist
policing. Philadelphia, supposedly the “city of brotherly love,” has
a long history of racist cops. The most famous is the former police
commissioner and mayor of Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo. Rizzo’s cops
were infamous for attacks on the Black community. This included
dropping young Black people in hostile white neighborhoods so that
they had to run for their lives to get home. Under Rizzo, the police
violently attacked the Black Panther Party and Black civil rights
organizations.
The racist attitudes of the Philadelphia police department culminated
in the May 1985 bombing of the MOVE house on Osage Avenue. On May 13,
police surrounded the house, firing more than 10,000 rounds of
ammunition at the home and used fire trucks to spray the house with
more than 450,000 gallons of water. Later in the day, a police
helicopter dropped a bomb on the roof sparking a fire. Rather than
use the fire department to extinguish the fire, the decision was made
to “let the fire burn” ultimately destroying 61 homes, leaving 250
people homeless, and killing 11 members of the MOVE organization,
including five children.
The only person to be imprisoned after this crime was MOVE’s Ramona
Africa, the sole adult survivor of the police attack (one child,
Bertie Africa, also came out alive). No police or public official
faced any legal consequences.
Cop “unions”
Building resistance to police violence means exposing the reactionary
role of police unions in society and the labor movement. Cop unions
not only make excuses for the murderers in their ranks, they support
racist and reactionary policies like mass incarceration. Within the
ranks of organized labor, cop unions play a reactionary role by
opposing progressive initiatives.
The Fraternal Order of Police and Police Benevolent Association are
the largest police unions. The Teamsters, American Federation of
State, County, and Municipal Employees, and the Service Employees
International Union also represent police and prison guards. Building
labor solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement within the
labor movement means challenging the role of police unions and
demanding that labor federations cut ties to these reactionary
anti-worker organizations.
Revolutionary socialists reject the notion that police are a
legitimate part of the workers’ movement. While police may be drawn
from the ranks of the working class, they serve the interests of a
racist capitalist social order. It’s the role they play as enforcers
of the existing state and economic set up that is decisive.
Leon Trotsky, writing about cops in the 1930s, said, “The worker who
becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a
bourgeois cop, not a worker. Of late years, these policemen have had
to do much more fighting with revolutionary workers than with Nazi
students. Such training does not fail to leave its effects. And above
all: every policeman knows that though governments may change, the
police remains.”
Socialists reject calls for more cops and for “law and order,” since
these policies always disproportionately target oppressed
nationalities and workers. This is why, for example, we must oppose
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s call for adding thousands of more
police in Britain in the wake of terror attacks.
We must continue to mobilize for justice against police violence and
work to expose the links between neo-fascist groups and cops. The
future of the various movements depends on our ability to link the
struggles for justice against the system. This means holding the
system’s enforcers in blue accountable.
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July 18, 2017 in Black Liberation, Marxist Politics and Philosophy,
Philadelphia, Police & FBI.
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